Stacy Patrice: Healing Souls with Yoga

The first time Stacy Patrice took a yoga class was in 2005 after her father passed away and a friend suggested yoga to help her sort through her grief. Stacy enjoyed the class but says, “As life happened at that time, the practice didn’t stick.” It would take another major life change—pregnancy, childbirth, and postpartum recovery—to bring her back to yoga.

Stacy had always been creative; she’d been a visual artist and dancer since she was five. Throughout her childhood, Stacy’s mother exposed her to a variety of interests, disciplines and travels that immersed her in culture and creativity. Stacy’s expression of those interests led to regular performances, recitals and, later, art installations. Stacy’s sixth grade teacher considered her artistic talent exceptional and led Stacy to begin as a student at Marwen Arts Foundation, where she thrived. Throughout her teens, Stacy had a strong interest in fashion and entrepreneurship, creating business ideas that allowed her to earn money while creating beautiful things for others.

Stacy inevitably chose business school over art school and traveled down south to a new culture at an HBCU (historically black colleges and universities), the School of Business & Industry at Florida A & M University in Tallahassee. After graduating in 2001, Stacy returned to Chicago, briefly working in business management before returning to her creative roots. Throughout her adult years she enjoyed success as a runway model, hair and wardrobe stylist, jewelry designer, website designer, photographer, and creative director for clients in the music, fashion, beauty, and wellness industries. Throughout these times, Stacy utilized Chicago’s house scene to continue her love of dancing and taught at performing arts schools, high schools, and universities.

In 2009, Stacy gave birth to a nine-pound, ten-ounce son. She was adamant about continuing to be the kind of woman she had been before becoming a mother: spontaneously creative, confident, and connected with her body. Her creative work continued to bring joy and satisfaction, but she needed to find a way to balance her work, healing, and homeschooling her son. The suggestion of yoga and meditation resurfaced, and Stacy started going to Moksha Yoga Center where she was immediately attracted to the sense of community and recognized that, through yoga, she would be able to reconnect with herself spiritually. Soon after, she signed up for Moksha’s 15-month teacher training program, studying with Daren Friesen, Rich Logan, Lani Granum, and Gabriel Halpern. Stacy found yoga helped her get her body back into shape and calm the anxiety she’d been experiencing. In addition, her spiritual immersion inspired her approach to dance, art, photography, and writing. It also taught her patience.

Stacy found that the reconnection with her true self was not only beneficial for her own well-being, but it also showed her son that there are tools available to get him through anxious times. When he was three, he started practicing yoga along with Stacy and his dad, who is also a yoga instructor. Now, at age eight, he has a yoga and meditation practice that, with a gentle reminder, enables him to get re-centered when he needs to.

There was an unsettling period where Stacy was experiencing angst, a time that was challenging to herself and others close to her. During this period, there was a domestic incident that disrupted Stacy’s life and marked a turning point where she began relying upon the eight limbs of yoga to clear the hurt she was experiencing. Stacy created a sacred space within her regular practice, which she calls Soul Healing Yoga, that consistently calmed her down and neutralized her anger while she moved through a range of emotions. It didn’t always look like a regular yoga practice. Instead she moved in more spontaneous ways that not only made her feel better at the time, but also helped her focus and redirect her energy physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually. Sometimes she’d practice up to seven times a day to achieve clarity and empowerment.

Soul Healing Yoga was also a way for Stacy to connect with others in empathic ways—something that comes natural to her. Stacy says she has always been the kind of person who listens to the concerns of others and picks up that 2:00 a.m. phone call. In high school she had a teacher who inspired her love for psychology, and at one point Stacy strongly considered therapy as a career field.

Stacy’s father had been a scholar and schoolteacher with a strong interest in psychology, religion, and the occult. “He was a little New Age before I’d ever heard the term,” says Stacy. “He was always trying to get me to recall . . . everything [that was happening] around me. I realized much later that he was teaching me awareness and presence.”

When she began exploring the mind/body connection in yoga, Stacy recalled conversations with her father about mystical experiences, astral travel, and dreams. Her yoga community became her “soul family.” For her dissertation in teacher training, she wrote about yoga as a lifestyle for creatives. At the time, Stacy’s intention was to teach yoga “in an inspiring setting in the community, for the community, connected with creative people.”

It would be just a couple of years before Stacy realized her goal. After teacher training, she taught yoga as an alignment-based practice at fitness studios for a few years. Eventually, she says, “The aesthetic for it wasn’t working—a sweaty, grungy place for an uplifting lifestyle practice….” She also felt that the style of yoga she wanted to teach would not fit the format of traditional yoga studios.

Stacy took a year off from teaching, during which she had a dream about a beautiful, sunny, open space with lots of windows through which she could see trees; filling the space were people she’d never met. She wrote down that dream but had no idea if the space actually existed or where it was. When she felt ready to start teaching her way, she talked to numerous business owners on the South Side, asking if they would allow the members of the community who patronized their businesses to use their premises during non-peak hours to practice yoga. Stacy says, “People laughed. They quoted me exorbitant prices and told me, ‘Black people don’t do yoga,’ and so I waited.”

And then one day in a conversation with Theaster Gates, a friend from the arts scene, Stacy mentioned that she was seeking a place to teach a group yoga class and offer culturally rich wellness programming for the South Side community, with Soul Healing Yoga as the anchor. He asked her to put her idea in writing, which she did. The timing was immaculate, says Stacy, as it coincided with the opening of Dorchester Art Center at 1456 E. 70th Street, which became the dedicated space where Stacy offered Soul Healing Yoga as part of a larger cultural wellness program.

Stacy says she cried when she saw the place, “a beautiful glass space in the middle of the ’hood. The place in my dreams was nowhere near as beautiful, nor as big. I had no idea that this was what was going to manifest. I held space for it and kept my vibration high. This program just took on another life in what it could mean to the community, and especially to the artist community.”

Soul Healing Yoga has been offered at the Dorchester Arts Center since spring 2015, meeting on Sundays from 1:00 to 3:00 p.m. and Wednesdays from 6:30 to 7:30 p.m. Classes are free, mats are available, and sessions are sponsored in partnership with Rebuild Foundation.

Stacy begins her Sunday classes with a half hour of discussion. In the past year, she devoted seven months to exploring the chakras (seven energy centers in the body) with her students. Over the next three months, the class immersed itself in Rod Stryker’s book The Four Desires: Creating a Life of Purpose, Happiness, Prosperity, and Freedom. In one of the classes, Stacy led a discussion of a chapter that addresses how people’s habits can inhibit fulfilling their intentions. Students readily shared their personal habits, such as procrastination, emotional eating, and staying in unhealthy relationships, which Stacy adeptly related to Stryker’s message. (After that class, one student commented that the class was like a group therapy session. Several psychologists, incidentally, regularly attend Stacy’s classes.)

A group meditation follows the discussion, and then Stacy leads the class through yoga postures, emphasizing breathing cues, and suggesting modifications for various levels of abilities. Jazz classics play in the background. In a class I attended we moved from chair pose to plough and back up again (without using the hands)—a unique and challenging movement.

On a video on her website, Stacy says that the idea behind Soul Healing Yoga is to allow people to feel like yoga is a personal prescription for their life, as opposed to simply doing exercises, getting fit, and having a yoga butt. It’s to allow people to tap into themselves, into their soul, and to use the practice of yoga to go deeper.

All Things Stacy

Birthplace: Chicago’s South Side

Astrological sun sign: Pisces

Favorite pose: Adho mukha svanasana (downward facing dog); it’s in every single one of my practices.

Least favorite pose: Dhanurasana (bow pose) because I never get accustomed to the sensation and balance of it; I haven’t found the ease in it, and it still feels unnatural to me.

Favorite snack: popcorn with turmeric, black pepper, and seaweed

Favorite music: I love jazz for its free form as well as its influence on my other favorites: house music, soul music, and hip-hop.

Free-time activity: Create. I love to innovate and reimagine my life experiences regularly. If there is something that I desire that is functionally ineffective to me in its current form or is missing necessary cultural implications, then I go about improving upon the design and use all of my creative resources to do so.

What people don’t know about me: That I create in response to my growth and life changes, so the offerings I share with others fortify and fulfill me just as much as them.

Words I live by: I have a personal mantra: “Be the you that you are, when no one else is looking, in front of everyone.”

Future goals: To travel the world, world-schooling my son, documenting world culture through my travels, and sharing my light in whatever form is appreciated at the time.

Reading choice: Magazines are my favorite thing to read because they are visual. Reading magazines inspires me to write. I created Soul Flow, a workbook with writing prompts (a scenario, idea, or question) for adults who want to know themselves in a deeper way.

What I tell people: To take the time to be with yourself and build intimacy with yourself in this world we live in is a courageous act.

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Stacy Patrice guides and assists others through Soul Healing and is available to facilitate workshops, speak to groups, hold private consultations, and lead retreats and special events for individuals and organizations. She can be reached through her website, stacypatrice.com.​

Sharon Steffensen is the editor and publisher of Yoga Chicago magazine. She has been teaching yoga since 1975.